The 1-Minute Weight Loss Cheat Sheet – Quick Shortcuts & Tactics for Busy Women (6 page)

Cold water, hot water, steam, and ice all get different reaction
s from your body and from your internal organs.

Think about it.

For the purposes of this book, we’ll concentrate on cold water because it’s considered “alive” as opposed to hot water which is considered “dead.”

Cold water energizes, invigorates, and fortifies the body. Cold water creates circulation and overcomes sluggishness while unblocking any energy barriers within your body. One of the reasons cold water works so great is because it stimulates the body into a reaction. I’ll explain
more about this shortly.

Cold water rin
ses, which I’m about to explain literally turns your body into a fat burning machine. The reason is simple. The cold water stimulates your body to heat up… to raise its core temperature as a reaction to the cold water, which is in effect, forcing your body to a lower core temperature.

Think of your natural reaction when you’re cold. You shiver. That’s your body’s way of creating heat to warm you up. This is very similar in nature.
It’s basically a fight between cold water and your body.

Your body is saying “Uh,
nooooo
, I’m going to internally heat up to fight you. I won’t allow you to lower the core temperature.”

Cold water rinses are simple. Here is how they force your body into a higher internal temperature that helps burn fat better:

Take your normal shower
as usual. If you can make your “normal” shower just a little on the cold side, even better.

A
fter you finish your shower, turn the water to as cold as possible and let it spray all over your body for 20-30 seconds.

That’s it. Just 20-30 seconds.
After that, turn the water off and get a towel as quickly as possible!

Note:
Yes, you
can
get used to this within a few times.

By doing this cold water rinse, you’ll force your body into fat burning mode for up to a few hours after your shower. Basically, you just flipped the switch with a simple 20-30 seconds of cold water.

Once you do the cold water rinse, do
not
use hot or warm water on your body for the next 20 minutes. That will just ruin everything. Give your body a chance to react and put itself into fat burning “survival” mode. Yes, you will be cold. That’s the idea! Let your body work extra to warm you up.

You’re perfectly safe in your own home, but
your body is reacting as if you’re freezing to death. Your body therefore raises your core temperature to fight off the cold. Let your body do its job so you can take full advantage of its reaction in order to lose weight.

You’re first going to yell and curse my name when you try the cold water rinses, but after a few weeks when you start to see weight loss results from
the 20-30 seconds a day of cold water rinses, you’ll then think I’m a genius.

Try them. See for yourself.

Its 20-30 seconds of torture, but the long term fat loss and health benefits are worth it. And it’s almost a freebie, improving your fat loss in virtually no time and with virtually no more effort than what you do already.

If I could rank one of the top fat-loss exercises in existence, the infamous Stair Runs-Walks may be it. It fits all our criteria of being simple, convenient, not requiring expensive equipment, and the regimen is not time intensive.

And guess what the best part is? This fat-loss exercise will not only help your overall fitness and reduce your fat levels; it helps you develop a firm butt too!

Obviously, no exercise named
Stair Runs-Walks
is going to be possible without some stairs somewhere. Certainly you should not buy or rent something like a Stairmaster. That is
way
over the top and wastes your time, money, and space... and a stair-stepper would hurt your results anyway. All you need are some sturdy stairs at home. If you have those, you’re ready to roll and everything will be totally convenient.

If
you don’t have inside stairs, do you possibly have some outside? If your backyard slopes down and you have stairs leading out then use those.

Tip:
If you have a good friend for a neighbor who has stairs, what you may find works best is to let her in on the secrets of this book
and exercise together using her stairs. After a couple of weeks of thinner thighs and tighter glutes, she will thank you!

Yes, I know you want the specifics. But humor me because before getting further it’s critical that I describe what
not
to do before I describe what you
should
do.

Note:
I caution you to
not
go out and try this exercise at its fullest right away.

Unless you
’re in good condition already and actively exercise a lot, you probably won’t be able to handle this workout right away. That is just fine. It is best to build up to it.

But
as the song goes, don’t worry, be happy!

The good news is this: Your
results from this exercise will be so quick that even if it takes you two weeks to begin doing the exercise exactly as outlined, you’re still be
way
ahead of everyone else.

The plan for
Stair Runs-Walks
is simple. Here is what you do:

1. Run up
   one to three flights of stairs.
   
2. When you hit the top,
   walk back down the stairs.
   
3. Repeat as many times as possible for
   five minutes
   without
   stopping.
   

A big part of the reason why this is so efficient at burning off body fat is because you are always moving.

You do get a rest on the walks down the stairs, but it’s an active rest. It is not a passive rest.

Note:
Have you watched Olympic runners? After an agonizing run, whether sprinting or long-distance, the runners hit the finish line and in spite of the fact they are exhausted they do not lie down. Instead they
walk!
You’d think the last thing they want to do is keep moving but a heavy-breathing slow walk
is
how they recover. The human body seems to want to recover from an exhaustive run by walking and moving, albeit at a much slower pace.

These between-run walks starting at the top of each flight of stairs gives you an added bonus benefit. You don’t get a complete rest before you have to run up the stairs again. You will find that you will need to take a lot of deep breaths. You will consume oxygen heavily.

About the deep breaths
... those add to your fat-burning. The walks down the stairs help turn you into a fat-burning machine!

“
Why is that?” you ask? It’s science, but simple science. For your body to burn off fat and use that fat for energy, your body must combine your fat with oxygen to release that fat effectively and efficiently. The more oxygen you breathe into your lungs and, therefore, ultimately into your bloodstream, the more body fat you will burn.

Note:
Consider this: If you skipped exercising completely and only performed several deep breathing exercises throughout the day, you would increase your body’s fat loss by the deep breathing alone. It won’t be nearly as effective as breathing while exercising, but it’ll still burn more fat than if you do not exercise. That oxygen is a nice, effective fat-burning agent. And given that this exercise requires only
five minutes
, and that’s once you work up
to
five minutes, you just have no excuse not to spend those five minutes on the stairs
and
getting that healthy fat-burning oxygen.

Remember, even if your body begins getting used to the Stair Runs-Walks and can get through the first two or three minutes without breathing heavily,
I encourage you to consciously perform a deep breathing pattern on the walks to maximize your weight loss.

Just
don’t use deep breathing alone as a substitute for the Stair Runs-Walks.

The Stair Run-W
alks exercise has additional fat-los benefits. Not only does the deep breathing become far heavier and unforced as you get into the exercise’s rhythm, but also the actual movement you perform helps you a great deal too.

Obvious you don
’t move when you’re doing deep breathing without exercise. And perhaps most important, deep breathing alone won’t help you develop a firm butt like the way this exercise will.

The bottom line is that
body fat needs a lot of oxygen present in order to burn itself off and be released as energy. Most people only shallow breathe, they rarely exercise, and they usually breathe polluted air. We don’t get as much oxygen as we should into our cells. Think back 100 years when most families lived on a farm or in a country environment. The clean outside air combined with their labor made them lean machines.

With modern times, we get the good with the bad. With our tablet computers and office jobs we get thicker thighs and hipper hips. Ugh! It’s a good thing we can do something about those to help make up for what we give up for modern living.

The actual fat burning process where energy is created and released depends on something called
adenosine triphosphate
or
ATP
for short. By oxygenating your body’s cells through the exercise-induced deep breathing, your body produces an environment that encourages the production of ATP. With more ATP you get more fat burning.

And
that’s the boring science behind it. Fortunately we don’t have to be scientists to have thinner thighs and waistlines.

The first thing you need to do is test yourself on one to three flights of stairs.

Note:
By the way, your goal should be to run up the stairs in the range of five to fifteen seconds or so. One flight of stairs isn’t necessarily worse than 3 flights depending on how long it takes you.

Just choose what works best for you and put in the effort.

Once you know how in-shape you are, you can decide how hard you will seriously try to do the full five minutes of running up the stairs and walking down the stairs. Non-stop.

How you do this is up to you
. I strongly encourage you to take it slow for the first one to two weeks if you’re not very athletic. This gives your body a chance to build up, extend your abilities, and to make sure you don’t become overly sore. Becoming too sore too soon will discourage you and you won’t want to continue this waist-reducing routine.

W
hat I’d like for you to do for the first day is spend only one minute running up the stairs and walking down them. Don’t stop during that one minute. Repeat this sequence five separate times during the day.

Mix it up at first. Listen to your body to decide what will challenge you without exerting you. For example, y
ou could spend one full minute doing the Runs-Walks, stop and rest one full minute, and so on until you’ve completed the full five minutes of Runs-Walks. Or, you can do one minute here and there throughout the day… even if you do so several hours apart.

It
’s all up to you.

Once you feel you that you have fully mastered those one-minute Stair Runs-Walks, you’re your time to a full two minutes of non-stop Stair Runs-Walks.

Then, once you
’ve mastered that, bump up to doing them for three minutes, again non-stop. Keep going to four minutes non-stop, and then finally you’ll be doing it for the full five minutes non-stop.

Note:
When you first read about the Stair Runs-Walks, you may be fooled into thinking that five minutes isn’t much at all. Trust me, you will find out the first time you begin this exercise that five minutes
at first
is like an eternity. If you’re used to doing the stairstepper, you’ll be in for a shock at how much more intense real stairs are.

For the average person,
moving up to the five-minute level will take somewhere between one to three weeks. If you’re somewhat athletic and in shape when you begin, then the full five minutes of non-stop Stair Runs-Walks should take you a week or less.

Whatever you do, do not concede the race before you even begin it!
Don’t feel that you have to be able to do the Stair Runs-Walks for five minutes, non-stop, immediately.
Most
people can’t.

Once you master the top level, stay with it and don’t go more than the five minutes. You’ll reach a point of diminishing returns.
After doing the Stair Runs-walks for five minutes non-stop, five days a week, for two weeks, you will almost certainly have lost at least five pounds of fat from this one exercise alone. And keep this in mind: the time it has taken you to read just this far into this book is
far
more time than you’ll consume doing Stair Runs-Walks over several days’ time! In other words, those five pounds are coming off not because you have built up to become a marathon runner, but only because you’ve built up to five minutes! And for many of you, you’re doing this inside your own home! Running was never as good as this, or as effective!